Tag Archives: Age

I turn 56 in a week, and I’ve been thinking about how life changes with age. I’ve come up with a view expressed in terms of two key distinctions:

Foregame vs. Endgame Actions in games often have both direct local immediate consequences, and also more indirect global delayed consequences, such as those that result from how other players react to your actions, then more others react to those actions, and so on. The longer a game that stretches ahead, and the more other players who interact, the more that these indirect consequences can matter. In contrast, at the end of a game there are fewer moves others make after you, and fewer other players that your moves might influence. So endgame play focuses more on direct local immediate consequences. Cooperation often breaks down in endgames, as it often depends on threats of future and wider reprisals against uncooperative behaviors.

Turbulent vs. Laminar When fluids like water flow slowly, their flow patterns tend to be simple, stable, predictable, and efficient. As one increases the pressure pushing a fluid while holding constant its environment, the flow velocity also increases, and at some point the fluid switches to flowing in complex, unstable, and unpredictable ways. Turbulent flows are less efficient; if you must pay to push fluids then you want to keep your flow laminar. But turbulent flows also mix fluids much better. Each part of a turbulent flow could end up in far more possible future locations, and next to far more other parts, than can similar parts of a laminar flow.

My view is: Young life is a turbulent foregame, while old life is a laminar endgame. That is, when young we are in the foregame of life, where our life paths are more turbulent, and when older we transition into the endgame of life, where our life paths are more laminar.

In youth, the main consequences of our actions tend to be indirect, global, and delayed. Especially important are social consequences such as what others think of us, and who allies with us. We can end up with very different reputations, mates, communities, occupations, industries, and so on. The life paths of young people also tend to be complex, unstable, unpredictable, and inefficient. For any one young person, it is hard to guess their future mates, jobs, communities, and status, and they may inefficiently change directions and paths many times.

In old age, in contrast, we tend to make fewer and smaller changes to our mates, jobs, communities, and status. We don’t adapt as much to changing opportunities as when young, but this is mostly reasonable given our many investments. We are mostly stuck with existing associates and allies, and wider communities involve themselves with us less. So while we need to worry about how our immediate associates will react soon to things we do, we don’t need to concern ourselves as much with wider more delayed circles. And even our immediate associates can do less to help or hurt us. So we focus more on direct, local, immediate consequences of our actions.

When young, we collect and explore many options, including in associates. We meet many people, and while we don’t want to commit to strong relationships with most of them, we like the option of exploring those possibilities more later, especially if these people should become powerful and high status. The mean value of a future association may be much larger than its median value. That is, we can sometimes mostly care about the chance that they will later become especially powerful or high status.

The young should be especially wary of creating enemies with powerful allies. So when young we tend more to endorse and adopt the standard social norms of our world, including those that say everyone that meets certain criteria should be treated with minimal respect, as if they might become high status someday. As a result, younger people acquire thicker longer distance networks of associations, which can create powerful incentives to seem and act cooperative on larger social scales. The future weighs heavily, and a wide social circle matters more. Also, since when young we understand the social world less, and a wider social world is more complex, we are then more worried about unexpected consequences.

When older, in contrast, we are less worried about wider social punishment of our behaviors. Fewer people matter to us, their and our life paths are more predictable, and we understand our smaller social world much better. So we can more directly calculate the consequences of what we do to people. Thus we are more willing to betray distant allies of allies, as we less fear their future reprisal. So when older we are more in a laminar endgame, where our actions are less guided by generic social norms on how to uniformly treat a wide circle, and more guided by calculating the personal consequences of doing particular things to particular people. For example, we need less to pretend that everyone might become high status, as it becomes safer to treat associates differently by their now stable status.

In many job promotion ladders, and also many other kinds of status ladders, previous status sets a rough lower bound on current status. Thus people tend to rise in status over time until a point in time when they stop rising and then mostly stay near the same status. In such cases, those who are still rising have a more turbulent life path, while those who have stopped have a more laminar path. This creates a correlation between status and turbulence. Thus high status people tend to have more turbulent lives, more like the lives of the young, helping to make the turbulent lives of the young seem higher status. And high status people can less see the age pattern I’m describing.

If you are young, you might wonder how much people do things because they are good people who really believe in the morality of the standard norms, as opposed to doing things out of fear of social reprisal. You might wonder in particular what your associates would do to you if they less feared such reprisal. Good news: when older you will have much clearer data on this. And typical older people around you also have data now, if you will ask them. Haven’t asked? Perhaps you don’t like the answer you think they will tell. Or maybe you don’t trust them to tell you the truth. (And if they’d lie, which theory does that support?)

In the above, I have told a functional story about how behavior should reasonably change with age. However, I should admit that human behavior has not adapted very much to big changes that appeared only in the last few centuries. One of those big changes is that young lives are far more turbulent than those of our forager or farmer ancestors. So turbulent in fact as to call into question the plausibility of social reprisal. For example, high school students often invest greatly in their social reputation, an investment that is mostly lost when they go off to separate colleges and jobs. A more adaptive response to the modern world would be to more ignore wider social reprisal when very young and turbulent, then pay it more attention at a middle age of moderate turbulence, and then less attention again when old.

Let me also note that for some kinds of behavior young people can be at an endgame. Warring drug dealers who don’t expect to live more than a decade longer may feel they are in a local endgame. Also, evolution might have primed young men trying to impregnate young women while they are still promiscuous and fertile to treat that part of their lives as an endgame, since the consequences can be so huge there compared to later opportunities.

This whole perspective suggests another explanation for the puzzle of why we express more interest in people who have the potential to achieve X, relative to people who have already achieved X. Perhaps we presume that someone with the potential to X is younger with a wider social network that we might join by affiliating with them. In contrast, we presume that a person who has already achieved X is older, more tied to their key social network, and less open to new alliances with us.

Have you heard about the new “effective cars” movement? Passionate young philosophy students from top universities have invented a revolutionary new idea, now sweeping the intellectual world: cars that get you from home to the office or store and back again as reliably, comfortably, and fast as possible. As opposed to using cars used as shrub removers, pots for plants, conversation pits, or paperweights. While effective car activists cannot design, repair, or even operate cars, they are pioneering ways to prioritize car topics.

Not heard of that? How about “effective altruism”?

Effective altruism is about asking, “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s true, and a commitment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be. …

I helped to develop the idea of effective altruism while a [philosophy] student at the University of Oxford. … I began to investigate the cost-effectiveness of charities that fight poverty in the developing world. The results were remarkable. We discovered that the best charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely “good” charities. .. From there, a community developed. We realized that effective altruism could be applied to all areas of our lives – choosing charity, certainly, but also choosing a career, volunteering, and choosing what ewe buy and don’t buy. (MacAskill, Doing Good Better)

This all sounds rather vacuous; who opposes applying evidence and careful reasoning to figure out how to do better at charity, or anything? But I just gave a talk at Effective Altruism Global, and spent a few days there chatting and listening, and I’ve decided that they do have a core position that is far from vacuous.

Effective altruism is a youth movement. While they collect status by associating with older people like Peter Singer and Elon Musk, those who work and have influence in these groups are strikingly young. And their core position is close to the usual one for young groups throughout history: old codgers have run things badly, and so a new generation deserves to take over.

Some observers see effective altruism as being about using formal statistics or applying consensus scientific theories. But in fact effective altruists embrace contrarian concerns about AI “foom” (discussed often on this blog), concerns based neither on formal statistics nor on applying consensus theories. Instead this community just trusts its own judgment on what reasoning is “careful,” without worrying much if outsiders disagree. This community has a strong overlap with a “rationalist” community wherein people take classes on and much discuss how to be “rational”, and then decide that they have achieved enough rationality to justify embracing many quite contrarian conclusions.

Youth movements naturally emphasis the virtues of youth, relative to those of age. While old people have more power, wealth, grit, experience, task-specific knowledge, and crystalized intelligence, young people have more fluid intelligence, potential, passion, idealism, and a clean slate. So youth movements tend to claim that society has become lazy, corrupt, ossified, stuck in its ways, has tunnel-vision, and forgets its ideals, and so needs smart flexible idealistic people to rethink and rebuild from scratch.

Effective altruists, in particular, emphasize their stronger commitment to altruism ideals, and also the unusual smarts, rationality, and flexibility of their leaders. Instead of working within prior organizations to incrementally change prior programs, they prefer to start whole new organizations that re-evaluate all charity choices themselves from scratch. While most show little knowledge of the specifics of any charity areas, they talk a lot about not getting stuck in particular practices. And they worry about preventing their older selves from reversing the lifetime commitments to altruism that they want to make now.

Effective altruists often claim that big efforts to re-evaluate priorities are justified by large differences in the effectiveness of common options. Concretely, MacAskill, following Ord, suggested in his main conference talk that the distribution looks more like a thick-tailed power law than a Gaussian. He didn’t present actual data, but one of the other talks there did: Eva Vivalt showed the actual distribution of estimated effects to be close to Gaussian.

But youth movements have long motivated members via exaggerated claims. One is reminded of the sixties counter-culture seeing itself as the first generation to discover sex, emotional authenticity, and a concern for community. And saying not to trust anyone over thirty. Or countless young revolutionaries seeing themselves as the first generation to really care about inequality or unwanted dominance.

When they work well, youth movements can create a strong bond within a generation than can help them to work together as a coalition as they grow in ability and influence. As with the sixties counter-culture, or the libertarians a bit later, while at first their concrete practice actions are not very competent, eventually they gain skills, moderate their positions, become willing to compromise, and have substantial influence on the world. Effective altruists can reasonably hope to mature into such a strong coalition.

Added 1a: The last slide of my talk presented this youth movement account. The talk was well attended and many people mentioned talked to me about it afterward, but not one told me they disagreed with my youth movement description.

Added 10a: Most industrials and areas of life have a useful niche to be filled by independent quality evaluators, and I’ve been encouraged by the recent increase in such evaluators within charity, such as GiveWell. The effective altruism movement consists of far more, however, than independent quality evaluators.

Added 8Aug: OK, for now I accept Brienne Yudkowsky’s summary of Vivalt, namely that she finds very little ability to distinguish the effectiveness of different ways to achieve any given effect, but that she doesn’t speak to the variation across different kinds of things one might try to do.

Grad students vary in their research autonomy. Some students are very willing to ask for advice and to listen to it carefully, while others put a high priority on generating and pursuing their own research ideas their own way. This varies with personality, in that more independent people pick more independent strategies. It varies over time, in that students tend to start out deferring at first, and then later in their career switch to making more independent choices. It also varies by topic; students defer more in more technical topics, and where topic choices need more supporting infrastructure, such as with lab experiments. It also varies by level of abstraction; students defer more on how to pursue a project than on which project ideas to pursue.

Many of these variations seem roughly explained by near-far theory, in that people defer more when near, and less when far. These variations seem at least plausibly justifiable, though doubts make sense too. Another kind of variation is more puzzling, however: students at top schools seem more deferential than those at lower rank schools.

Top students expect to get lots of advice, and they take it to heart. In contrast, students at lower ranked schools seem determined to generate their own research ideas from deep in their own “soul”. This happens not only for picking a Ph.D. thesis, but even just for picking topics of research papers assigned in classes. Students seem as averse to getting research topic advice as they would be to advice on with whom to fall in love. Not only are they wary of getting research ideas from professors, they even fear that reading academic journals will pollute the purity of their true vision. It seems a moral matter to them.

Of course any one student might be correct that they have a special insight into what topics are neglected by their local professors. But the overall pattern here seems perverse; people who hardly understand the basics of a field see themselves as better qualified to identify feasible interesting research topics than those nearby with higher status, and who have been in the fields for decades.

One reason may be overconfidence; students think their profs deserve more to be at a lower rank school than they do, and so estimate a lower quality difference between they and their profs. More data supporting this is that students also seem to accept the relative status ranking of profs at their own school, and so focus most of their attention on the locally top status profs. It is as if each student thinks that they personally have so far been assigned too low of a status, but thinks most others have been correctly assigned.

Another reason may be like our preferring potential to achievement; students try to fulfill the heroic researcher stories they’ve heard, wherein researchers get much credit for embracing ideas early that others come to respect later. Which can make some sense. But these students are trying to do this way too early in their career, and they go way too far with it. Being smarter and knowing more, students at top schools understand this better.

I started my Ph.D. at the age of 34, and Tyler hired me here at GMU at the age of 40. So by my lights Tyler deserves credit for overcoming the age bias. Tyler doesn’t discuss why this bias might exist, but a Stanford history prof explained his theory to me when I was in my early 30s talking to him about a possible PhD. He said that older students are known for working harder and better, but also for being less pliable: they have more of their own ideas about what is interesting and important.

I think that fits with what I’ve heard from others, and have seen for myself, including in myself. People complain that academia builds too little on “real world” experience, and that disciplines are too insular. And older students help with that. But in fact the incentive for each prof in picking students isn’t to solve the wider problems with academia. It is instead to expand an empire by creating intellectual clones of him or herself. And for that selfish goal, older students are worse. My mentors likely feel this way about me, that I worked hard and did interesting stuff, but I was not a good investment for expanding their legacy.

Interestingly this explanation is somewhat the opposite of the usualexcuses for age bias in Silicon Valley. There the usual story is that older people won’t take as many risks, and that they aren’t as creative. But the complaint about older Ph.D.s is exactly that they take too many risks, and that they are too creative. If only they would just do what they are told, and copy their mentors, then their hard work and experience could be more valued.

I find it hard to believe that older workers change their nature this much between tech and academia. Something doesn’t add up here. And for what its worth, I’ve been personally far more impressed by the tech startups I’ve known that are staffed by older folks.

I hereby offer Robin Hanson (only) 2-to-1 odds on the following statement:
“There will, by 1 January 2010, exist a robotic system capable of the cleaning an ordinary house (by which I mean the same job my current cleaning service does, namely vacuum, dust, and scrub the bathroom fixtures). This system will not employ any direct copy of any individual human brain. Furthermore, the copying of a living human brain, neuron for neuron, synapse for synapse, into any synthetic computing medium, successfully operating afterwards and meeting objective criteria for the continuity of personality, consciousness, and memory, will not have been done by that date.”
Since I am not a bookie, this is a private offer for Robin only, and is only good for $100 to his $50. –JoSH

At the time I replied that my estimate for the chance of this was in the range 1/5 to 4/5, so we didn’t disagree. But looking back I think I was mistaken – I could and should have known better, and accepted this bet.

I’ve posted on how AI researchers with twenty years of experience tend to see slow progress over that time, which suggests continued future slow progress. Back in ’91 I’d had only seven years of AI experience, and should have thought to ask more senior researchers for their opinions. But like most younger folks, I was more interested in hanging out and chatting with other young folks. While this might sometimes be a good strategy for finding friends, mates, and same-level career allies, it can be a poor strategy for learning the truth. Today I mostly hear rapid AI progress forecasts from young folks who haven’t bothered to ask older folks, or who don’t think those old folks know much relevant.

I’d guess we are still at least two decades away from a situation where over half of US households use robots do to over half of the house cleaning (weighted by time saved) that people do today.

Tali Sharot says we are optimistic because we under-respond to bad news, an effect weakest for the middle-aged, explaining why they are more pessimistic:

People of all age groups changed their beliefs more in response to good news, and they discounted bad news. Even more surprising was the finding that kids and elderly people both showed more of a bias than college students. …

From about the time we are teenagers, our sense of happiness starts to decline, hitting rock bottom in our mid-40s. (Middle-age crisis, anyone?) Then our sense of happiness miraculously starts to go up again rapidly as we grow older. …

Andrew Oswald … controlled for people being born in better times, marital status, education, employment status, income: The age pattern persisted. Even more surprising, the pattern held strong even though Oswald did not control for physical health. … Oswald tested half a million people in 72 countries, in both developing and developed nations. He observed the same pattern across all parts of the globe and across sexes. …

While women reach the bottom of the happiness barrel at 38.6 years on average, men reach it more than a decade later — at 52.9 years [but 44.5 in the U.S.] … Americans have been growing less happy since 1900. In Europe, however, happiness has been increasing steadily since 1950, after 50 years of decline. (more)

OK, but that just pushes the question back: why do middle-aged folks respond the most to bad news? An obvious functional explanation comes to my mind: In the tradeoff between (near) beliefs that support good personal decisions and (far) beliefs that present a good image to others, personal decisions matter more for the middle-aged. In general, good personal decisions matter more for those who who are more dominant, more in the productive prime of their life, and more past the early ages where long term bonds are formed, and before elderly dependence on others.

“Virginia has a lot of electronic voting and in general has an election system where it’s very hard to get recounts,” says Dill. “So I might worry about Virginia, depending on how close it is.” … It’s a lot easier to modify electronic records than to modify paper records which is why banking and a lot of other critical activities like that still rely on paper when there’s an ultimate disaster and electronic records are lost or corrupted. (more)

When I voted this morning in Virginia I noticed a line of 6-8 people waiting to use the electronic voting machines, but one could vote immediately on paper. Yet paper voting is less corruptible. I asked Alex Tabarrok and he said he puzzled over the same thing when he voted: why is paper voting so unpopular?

A fb comment noted that it is mostly old folks voting on paper. And that was true at my place as well. Which leads me to suggest that this is a status effect – people stand in line to vote less securely in order to signal that they aren’t old folks scared by or incompetent at electronics. Yes, it seems surprising that people are willing to spend an extra few minutes just to look hip to strangers. But what other explanation is there?

Humans … slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. … When people get idealistic, they tend to forget this. … They want to know how to most help the world in the next few years, not over their lifetime. … Young folks … should expect to prepare and learn while young, and then have their biggest influence in their peak years.

When I’m 50 I don’t really want the world to be the way it is now. I don’t want to bide my time and merely learn and network idly for another decade or two while someone else is responsible for enacting positive change in the world.

News flash: you are just one of seven billion, so you aren’t going to personally make much difference. The world will have nearly as many problems worth solving then as now, with or without your help.

Let’s say I was the CEO of a small corporation that developed medical devices. … A sustainable revenue stream requires projects with a variety of timelines. Similarly, I shouldn’t only invest my company’s resources in a project with a huge payout that will take 15 years.

The world already has a big portfolio of idealistic projects. If you want your life to be one of those projects, you should accept that it has a natural timescale. There’s a best time to invest, and a best time to reap returns.

Hanson elicits skepticism in the idea that social changes enacted now will positively impact the future, without justification.

I’m not skeptical of future impacts, just of their typically growing in impact faster than financial investments.

However, I’d counter-argue that his position is just as weak: name someone who is making better-than-inflation on their investments in the last 11 years?

The last few years have been quite unusual in finance. Feasible long term financial rates of return are higher than economic growth rates.

If I am to put off charity for 20 years to compound interest, why not put it off 40 years to compound even more? Why not put it off for 100 years?

Why not indeed? If you think that your personal monitoring adds much value, you might want to spend before you die, so you can personally monitor your charities. Else you might instruct your charity fund to grow until it seems that worthy causes are about to run out, or that investments no longer grow.

Hanson totally misguides when he suggests that Young Idealism is sexually motivated.

I said “signal one’s attractiveness to potential associates.” I didn’t mention sex.

Then what explains extra altruism in the old?

I said “people tend more to form associations when young.” This implies only that old folks have a weaker need to signal, not that they have no need to signal.

Humans have long lives. We are unusually dependent on our parents when young, and we then slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. Most of the time we are aware of this. For example, we count on our peak earning years by taking out loans as young students, and later saving for retirement. And we prefer leaders at those peak ages.

But when people get idealistic, they tend to forget this. Young idealists often ask me and others what they can do to most help the world. Which is a fine question. But such folks tend to be impatient – they want to know how to most help the world in the next few years, not over their lifetime. So when they consider joining an idealistic project, they focus more on whether the project will succeed than on what skills and contacts they would acquire.

Yet young folks shouldn’t expect to have their biggest influence when young. Yes young folks have higher variance, and so sometimes get very lucky, but they should expect to prepare and learn while young, and then have their biggest influence in their peak years. Why such a short term focus? Especially since idealism should if anything induce a far view. Yes young folks are often short-sighted, but why be more so about altruism than about school, relationships, etc.?

This seems related to thepuzzle of why people don’t leverage the power of compound interest to donate to help the future needy, instead of today’s needy. Some argue that the future won’t have any needy, or that helping today’s needy automatically helps future needy, at a rate growing faster than investment rates of return. I’m pretty skeptical about both of these claims.

One plausible explanation is that a habit of extra youthful altruism evolved as a way to signal one’s attractiveness to potential associates. People tend more to form associations when young, associations that they tend more to rely on when old. And potential associates like to see altruism, because it correlates with generosity and cooperation (as near-far theory predicts). But if you save money to help the future needy, or if you invest now in skills useful in future idealistic projects, that is less clearly a signal of altruism, because you might later change your mind and use that money or those skills for other purposes.

So to signal your youthful idealism to potential associates, you must spend the money and time now, even if such spending is less effective toward the idealistic cause. But hey, at least the cause gets something.

When I was at college, many of my associates had part time jobs, or worked during school breaks. They were often unpleasant, uninspiring, and poorly paid jobs, such as food preparation. Some were better, such as bureaucracy. But they were generally much worse than any of us would expect to be after graduating. I think this is normal.

It was occasionally suggested that I too should become employed. This seemed false to me, for the following reasons. There are other activities I want to spend a lot of time on in my life, such as thinking about things. I expect the nth hour of thinking about things to be similarly valuable regardless of when it happens. I think for a hundred extra hours this year, or a hundred extra hours in five years, I still expect to have about the same amount of understanding at the end, and for hours in ten years to be about as valuable either way.

Depending on what one is thinking about, moving hours of thinking earlier might make them more valuable. Understanding things early on probably adds value to other activities, and youth is purportedly helpful for thinking. Also a better understanding early on probably makes later observations (which automatically happen with passing time) more useful.

This goes for many things. Learning an instrument, reading about a topic, writing. Some things are even more valuable early on in life, such as making friends, gaining respect and figuring out efficient lifestyle logistics.

Across many periods of time, work is roughly like this. It is the total amount of work you do that matters. But between before and after graduating, this is not so!

If activity A is a lot more valuable in the future, and activity B is about as valuable now or in the future, all things equal I should trade them and do B now.

Yes, work before graduating might get you a better wage after graduating, but so will the same amount of work after graduating, and it will be paid more at the time. Yes, you will be a year behind say, but you will have done something else for a year that you no longer need to do in the future.

On the other hand, working seems a great option if you have pressing needs for money now, or a strong aversion to indebtedness. My guess is that the latter played a large part in others’ choices. In Australia, most youth whose families aren’t wealthy can get enough money to live on from the government, and anyone can defer paying tuition indefinitely.

It seems that college students generally treat their time as low value. Not only do they work for low wages, but they go to efforts to get free food, and are happy to spend an hour of three people’s time to acquire discarded furniture they wouldn’t spend a hundred dollars on. This seems to mean they don’t think these activities they could do at any time in their life are valuable. If you are willing to trade an hour you could be reading for $10 worth of value, you don’t value reading much. When these people are paid a lot more, will they give up activities like reading all together? If not, it seems they must think reading is also more valuable in the future than now, and the relative values are jumping roughly in line with the value of working at these times. Or do they just make an error? Or am I just making some error?